Game of Thrones: This Gruesome Callback May Have Just Sealed Cersei’s Fate

The writing’s on the wall for this Mad Queen.

This post contains frank discussion of Season 7, Episode 3 of Game of Thrones: “The Queen’s Justice.” If you’re not caught up or don’t want to be spoiled, now would be the time to leave. Seriously, I won’t warn you again. Skedaddle.

Well, there’s no doubting that Cersei has changed dramatically since Season 1. The woman who imprisoned Ned Stark and committed a number of other atrocities—all in the name of keeping her secrets—is now openly flaunting her incestuous relationship with her brother in front of whatever Romulan-esque handmaiden might come knocking at her door. But while we’ve all noticed that Cersei (who has gone through a lot of trauma) has grown more and more evil, it’s the way she’s getting evil that should have, well, at least her concerned.

In this week’s episode, we saw Cersei get vicious revenge on Ellaria and Tyene Sand for the Season 5 death of her daughter, Princess Myrcella. She smeared on some (very pink) poisonous lipstick, gave Tyene a deathly kiss, and left mother and daughter chained up just out of one another’s reach to live out their final (or at least Tyene’s final) moments straining to get to each other.

This is a clear reference to an event the HBO series had been referencing pretty frequently this season: the deaths of Rickard and Brandon Stark. Sansa brought it up last week, and Jon mentioned it again in this episode when meeting Daenerys. But the death of Ned Stark’s father and brother at the hands of the Mad King Aerys has been bumping around the periphery of the show since Season 1.

In fact, a flashback featuring those harrowing Stark deaths was filmed for, and then cut out of, Episode 2. I’m going to airlift discussion of those deaths and that scene straight out of last week’s Easter eggs post, so if you’ve already done that reading, skip to the next bit.

Back at the beginning of Robert’s Rebellion, Ned’s brother, Brandon Stark—enraged over Rhaegar’s alleged “abduction” of their sister—stormed King’s Landing, demanding Lyanna back. He was arrested for treason, and when his father, Rickard, went to his son’s aid, Aerys cruelly murdered them both. Rickard was suspended from the ceiling in a full suit of armor while a fire blazed below him and Brandon, with a tether around his neck, was told he could cut his father free if only he could reach a sword placed just out of reach. Brandon strangled himself to death trying to save his father, who was roasted alive in his own armor. Ser Jaime Lannister recounted the terrifying scene to Ned back in Season 1:

Five hundred men just stood there and watched. All the great knights
of the Seven Kingdoms. You think anyone said a word, lifted a finger?
No, Lord Stark. Five hundred men, and this room was silent as a crypt.
Except for the screams, of course, and the Mad King laughing. And
later . . . when I watched the Mad King die, I remembered him laughing as
your father burned . . . it felt like justice.

Originally, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff had planned to show the deaths of Brandon and Rickard Stark via flashback in Season 1. But this was before they decided to entirely eschew flashbacks (until Season 5), throwing out the scene along with most of the show’s original pilot. But a split-second of a choking Brandon (played by an unidentified Sean Bean look-alike) made its way into a Season 1 trailer anyway.

The mirroring of Tyene/Ellaria and Rickard/Brandon isn’t the only way that Cersei has been displaying Aerys-esque tendencies. In the Season 7 premiere, Cersei, fresh off an explosion of the sept that would make the Mad King proud, employed some rhetoric that was very reminiscent of one of the more traumatic moments of Jaime’s life: the death of the Mad King Aerys. She stalked around that freshly painted floor map in the Red Keep and railed about how they were surrounded by enemies on all sides.

According to Jaime in Season 3, the Mad King “loved to watch people burn. The way their skin blackened and blistered and melted off their bones.” Sound familiar? In the end it was Jaime, the Kingslayer, who killed the Mad King in order to stop him from destroying the realm.

There’s a very popular theory that Jaime will kill Cersei, bolstered by a prophecy from the books (which you can read about here) that hints he might be the one to finish this Mad Queen off. But a number of people, including Bronn in Season 5 and Olenna in Season 7, have said that Cersei will be Jaime’s undoing. So possibly, we’re headed towards mutually assured destruction.

But speaking of the late, great Queen of Thorns: her last hurrah helps underline the growing distance between the Lannister twins. Cersei viciously murdered and tortured the women who killed her children, whereas Jaime allowed the woman who murdered his son to die rather gracefully (all things considered).

It’s true that he didn’t know Olenna had murdered Joffrey when he first offered her a much easier death than the Aerys-esque nastiness Cersei had planned. But once he did, he still might have used either that Valyrian steel at his hip or his golden hand to make her final moments more painful. He didn’t. And so we can clearly see the Lannister twins on two very different paths that may, sadly, lead to the same brutal end.

Game of Thrones Season 7 Photos

Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.By Macall B. Polay/Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO.By Macall B. Polay/Courtesy of HBO.By Macall B. Polay/Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.By Helen Sloan/HBO.By Helen Sloan/HBO.By Helen Sloan/HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBO.Courtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOCourtesy of HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOCourtesy of Helen Sloan/HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBOHELEN SLOAN / HBO

Get Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour.It’s our essential daily brief on culture, the news, and more. And it’s on the house.